A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

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Wednesday, July 19, 2017

AROUND THE FIFTH

While I was taking my morning walk [along the circumference
of the 5th arrondissement], I reflected on several very significant
recent developments in American domestic politics. [I shall reserve to a later post my responses
to the wealth of interesting comments about morality and international affairs.] I refer first to the revelations regarding
the meeting between Kushner, Trump jr., and Manafort and an ever expanding
roster of characters, and second the collapse of the efforts of Senate Republicans
to do something, anything, about the Affordable Care Act.

The daily revelations about the meeting make it more and
more likely that there was a sustained, extensive, conscious, deliberate
attempt by Trump himself and his closest advisors to work hand in glove with
agents of the Russian government to defeat Hilary Clinton, in return for which
assistance Trump would deliver a lifting of economic sanctions and other
desiderata of the Putin government. You
may adopt any evaluative stance toward this effort you wish, but it is becoming
more and more implausible to deny that it occurred. Since Clinton was an historically awful
candidate, she would no doubt have contrived to lose the election all on her own,
but pretty clearly laws were broken, and Robert Mueller will, I should imagine,
prosecute a number of the members of Trump’s family, unless, as I expect, Trump
intervenes and issues a raft of plenary pardons. I rather doubt there could be revelations
sufficiently awful to prod the Republican House to vote a bill of impeachment. We shall have to wait and see.

The failure of Senate health care initiatives is splendid
news, for two reasons. First, it stops
the Congress and President from doing terrible, terrible harm to tens of
millions of people. Second, it
establishes the political truth that health care is now indeed the third rail
of modern American politics, as Social Security once was. [For the youthful among you, when subways
powered by electricity were introduced, the trains ran on a pair of parallel
rails through which no electricity flowed.
The power was delivered by a third rail.
You could jump down onto the tracks and touch the first two rails with
impunity, so long as you got back up before the next subway train ran over you,
but if, when doing so, you touched the third rail, you got electrocuted.] The third rail became first a metaphor and
then a cliché for a legally established right or program it was
political death to touch.

The Democrats, even those suicidally bent on resurrecting the
Clintonian Democratic Leadership Council’s Third Way, have taken notice of the
spontaneous upswelling of resistance to the Republican efforts to repeal the
ACA and seem collectively to possess the wit to make opposition to those
efforts the centerpiece of their 2018 campaign.
By one of those bizarre turns that makes politics so hard to predict, in
the midst of this ground level resistance, Single Payer seems to be gaining
support.

By the way, merely flying to Paris seems to have made it
possible for me to squelch the tendency to view American politics as the natural
center of the universe. Very liberating.

6 comments:

Jerry Brown
said...

I agree that the failure (so far) of the Senate health insurance removal bills is splendid. And that it stops the Congress and the President from doing terrible harm to millions of people, which I would have considered wrong to do. Probably unethical even. But had it passed, there is no doubt that I would have blamed the group of Republicans in the Senate, both individually, and also collectively- because individually they could not have done the harm, but as a group they would have been able to. Luckily, so far their group has been largely ineffective in this area, and therefore cannot be held responsible for anything, even though many of their individual members would be up for attempted reckless endangerment charges if I had a say in it. It would be good if that group remains ineffective, at least in my opinion.

I am surprised you mentioned those old comments on the post about morality and international affairs- I have totally forgotten about that subject... Seriously though, I hope you are enjoying your stay in Paris even if they are making you eat snails.

Sadly, there's already concerted pushback from the Clintonistas, as evidenced by various articles sprinkled into the New York Times, WAPO, etc. Concerning things like: blue dog Democrats best bet for electoral success; or moderate governors countervailing leftward drift; or ... nauseatingly etc. Their motives? Hard to tell if it's a desire to remain out of power (who would envy being a Republican-in-power now), or a desire to remain in power (within the Democratic party) or more straightforwardly venal reasons about where their paychecks are likely to come from. (all topped with a garnish of ideological stupid).

With regard to the collaboration issue: agreed; this is the first piece of solid evidence presented to the public in the entire Russia-gate saga. But we are still a long way from impeachment which is less a legal issue than a political one and thus far the American public doesn't seemed too impressed with the "smoking gun" theory of Trump, Jr. emails.

Further, Glenn Greenwald has argued that the mtg in question is not only not a smoking gun but may not have been illegal: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/13/glenn_greenwald_donald_trump_jrs_emails

Also let us not forget the context: the original Maddow-DNC claim about the Russian "attack" on our elections seems to be fading away. Not only did the NYTs correct it's "17 American intelligence agencies" fabrication, but recent evidence (meta data) suggests that the data transfer in question was at 23 megabytes per second, far too fast to be explained by external hacking and therefore likely explained by an internal leak: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-10/new-research-shows-guccifer-20-files-were-copied-locally-not-hacked

Finally, we progressives need to be cautious about hitching our wagon to the security/police state that the "Russian attack" meme is accomplishing. Max Blumenthal, another outstanding independent journalist (ignored by liberal media and thus picked up by Fox for the following interview) makes the case that the hacking meme aligns Dem progressives with the permanent war and "free" trade agenda sought by the corporate Dem leaders: http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/07/17/donald-trump-russia-collusion-max-blumenthal-will-destroy-left-wing-democrats

But when Trump warns Mueller not to investigate his financial ties with Russia, is he not pointing to where the bodies lie? The question, then, is this: is the "billionaire class" that owns the country willing to investigate one of its own and risk revealing how the game is played?

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.